Stacy Black successfully defender her master’s thesis entitled “Towards Unifying Grounded and Distributional Semantics Using the Words-as-Classifiers Model of Lexical Semantics”. Stacy shifted topics halfway through her master’s work, and I was blown away at how quickly she learned some difficult concepts to be able to accomplish what she did for her thesis. I was able to capture the moment we on her committee told her “congratulations!” after her defense:
The SLIM Group has had some great success this year so far, despite the challenges and circumstances. We have had the following papers accepted to LREC, SIGDIAL, and SEMDIAL conferences/workshops:
- David McNeill and Casey Kennington. Learning Word Groundings from Humans Facilitated by Robot Emotional Displays. In Proceedings of SigDial, 2020. (Paper based on David’s master’s thesis; he was able to get Cozmo to learn words as it interacted with participants and compared when Comzo showed emotion behaviors vs. behaviors that were just task-oriented.)
- Casey Kennington, Daniele Moro, Lucas Marchand, Jake Carns and David McNeill. rrSDS: Towards a Robot-ready Spoken Dialogue System. In Proceedings of SigDial, 2020. (demo paper; we’ve been working hard on a set of modules for incremental dialogue on robots called rrSDS)
- Daniele Moro, Gerardo Caracas, David McNeill and Casey Kennington. Semantics with Feeling: Emotions for Abstract Embedding, Affect for Concrete Grounding. In Proceedings of SemDial, 2020. (Paper that explores tying emotion to abstract words as well as grounding concrete words into a representation of emotion.)
- Eric Booth, Jake Carns, Casey Kennington, and Nader Rafla. Evaluating and Improving Child-Directed Automatic Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of LREC, 2020. (Paper that explores how to improve child-directed ASR.)
We unfortunately are losing several of the SLIM Group members, as they are graduating and moving into bigger and better things!